This Is Me

Humphrey.

CHAPTER 1:

MY GIRLS

From as far back as I can remember there were only ever three of us: my mum, my sister Vicki, and me. I never questioned it, or at least I don’t remember doing so when I was little. It was only when I reached junior school that I began to realize that we weren’t the same as a lot of other families, and even then it never really bothered me. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t really miss what you’ve never had. On the rare occasions when someone at school asked me where my dad was, I told them he was dead. I don’t know why; perhaps it just sounded exciting. With hindsight I realize how tough it must have been for Mum, bringing up two young kids on her own, but even though I now know the extent to which she went without, my sister and I never once felt hard done by or in any way deprived as kids. We never wanted for anything, and Mum made sure we were being entertained by something or someone every day of our young lives. ‘My girls’, as she called us, were always her priority, and we were a tight-knit trio to be reckoned with.

It wasn’t surprising that Mum was so big on the importance of family. One of five siblings in a Welsh family, my mum, Mary Josephine Horton, was orphaned at a young age and brought up by her maternal grandparents, who lived in Hayes, Middlesex, and could scarcely cope with five young children. Two of them, Daniel and Jenny, were sent off to the Pestalozzi orphanage in Switzerland, but Mum was deemed too old to go so the children were split up. Her other sister was Yvonne, and she had a brother called Raymond (who sadly died at the age of nineteen) and they grew up at their grandparents’ house, all missing their younger brother and sister terribly. It must have been very hard for them, especially after losing their parents. Despite this, Mum was a clever girl who did well in school, but in those days it was virtually unheard of for working-class girls to go on to some kind of further education, so she had to leave school as soon as she was old enough and go out to work. She doesn’t really like talking about her childhood, and I have to respect that, but it’s clear that she didn’t have it easy growing up. I think that’s the reason she was always determined for us to have all the things and the opportunities that she didn’t, and when we were children she made sure that Vicki and I always understood and respected the importance of education.

Daniel and Jenny eventually came back to the UK when they were around sixteen, and these days Uncle Daniel (who I inherited my middle name, Danielle, from because we have the same birthday) lives in Wales, while Aunt Jenny lives in south-east London. Mum has always been very close to Jenny, and as a child we spent a lot of time with her and her husband, my Uncle Lenny, and their five children – four sons and a daughter. It was great for Vicki and me to have boys around to play with, despite the fact that they were right little tearaways at times, and when I was little I adored running around their flat with its huge sitting room (which I thought very posh because it had a serving hatch through into the kitchen). I have a particularly vivid childhood memory of us all standing on their balcony toasting the New Year at midnight; we had wonderful times there.

Tragically, my dear Uncle Lenny was killed when his lorry crashed in the Blackwall Tunnel while I was away on holiday with some friends aged eighteen. Nobody could get hold of me to let me know, and when I eventually called home and told Mum that I wanted to stay out in Greece for a little while longer, she didn’t have the heart to tell me what had happened because she didn’t want to ruin my holiday. It was devastating for all of us, and I don’t think my aunt Jenny has ever fully recovered. I’ve always stayed close to the family across the years, particularly my cousin, Matthew.

It’s often been reported that I grew up in Hackney, but that isn’t the case. I was born in Hackney South East hospital – which became Homerton Hospital – on 28 May 1962, but we actually lived in Highbury. Mum tells me I was such a good and quiet baby that she was constantly prodding me to make sure I was still breathing. From what I can gather I slept through most of my infancy, which was the exact opposite of my sister, Vicki, who I don’t think was particularly happy with my arrival. There were only fourteen months between us and I think she’d set her sights on being an only child. Younger children tend to snatch the attention away from older siblings from the start, and I was certainly no different. Mum told me that when I was a baby she left me in my big Silver Cross pram outside the butcher’s while she was inside making her order. Suddenly a man came in from outside and said to her: ‘Is that your little boy out there? Because he’s eating raw sausages and throwing eggs out of the pram ... ’

‘That’s not a boy, she’s a little girl,’ Mum snapped, angrily.

The truth of the matter was I didn’t have much hair and I did look a bit like Winston Churchill until I was two. Meanwhile, Vicki would often get hold of Mum’s make-up bag and paint my face completely black. Perhaps it was the only outlet she had for that sibling rivalry.

I was painfully shy around other people, and unlike my older and more extrovert sister, I could often be found hiding behind my mum’s skirt when I was a kid. It’s funny, because I sometimes think that my desire to act came out of my shyness. I saw performing as a way of coming out of my shell without giving anything of myself away. I was hiding behind someone else in the character I was portraying, and that’s the way I’ve always liked it. It seems to me that the people with the loudest and most outrageous personalities in real life don’t always make the best actors, though often people imagine that they might. There’s a big difference between acting and showing off, and I was never a show-off, especially as a child. I wouldn’t say boo to a goose back then. Even on my first day at nursery, my mum dropped me off and I screamed the place down. It was in a church hall in Islington, and I have this memory of sitting on the stage and swinging my legs, desperate for my mum to come and rescue me from this terrible place.

At the Gillespie Infants School in Highbury I had a lovely teacher called Miss Adler, who I thought was beautiful and who organized the Christmas nativity play. This was my first ever acting role, but pretty low-key, performance-wise. I can’t say for sure what my part in this extravaganza was, but I think I was just a sheep or some other farmyard animal. I certainly wasn’t Mary and I certainly wasn’t anyone with any clout as far as the ins and outs of the story went. In fact, for quite some years I landed boring roles in all the school productions. It’s a wonder I ever considered a career in acting, to be honest. I mean, how good is it ever going to get when you’re cast as a sheep at four? At one point I told Mum that I wanted to be a traffic warden or a policewoman when I grew up, swayed, perhaps, by the idea of hiding behind a uniform. It was Mum’s words that kept me going as the years went on.

‘It doesn’t matter how many lines you have, darling, or who you are playing. You’re always good.’

I guess she had a point. After all, Dame Judi Dench got an Oscar for Shakespeare In Love and she was only in it for fifteen minutes. Mind you, it didn’t help that although Mum wasn’t too bad with a needle and thread, she wasn’t exactly speedy when it came to making costumes, or, indeed, anything that involved knitting. I remember she started knitting a jumper when I was four, which I finally got to wear when I was about ten and my arms had grown about two feet, so it’s no wonder I never received any of the more coveted roles in those early years. Anyway, the day after my woolly debut the classroom burned down because somebody forgot to blow out the candles. I remember being devastated that the nativity scene had been wrecked, not to mention Miss Adler’s classroom. It was terribly sad, and the first in a long line of fiery episodes for me.

Apart from not having a man around, our family seemed different in other ways as far as I was concerned. My life at home was a lot more exciting than most of the other kids at school. It was a bit like a London, working-class version of that movie, Hideous Kinky, where the bohemian mother, played by Kate Winslet, whisks her kids off to Marrakech. Of course, we were only ever whisked off to Blackpool or Cornwall in a Morris Minor, but as far as we were concerned it was an adventure. Sometimes Mum would drive us all to Selsey Bill, West Sussex, and we’d stay in a great big caravan with Aunt Jenny and all her kids. It was on those trips that we had the best fun: tearing around on the beach all day, free as a bird, and then going to the caravan park clubhouse at night for a bit of a disco. It was there, in fact, that I got my first taste of fame. I didn’t enter the beauty pageant, but I did end up winning the coveted ‘knobbly knees’ contest one summer when I was about seven.

Mum was always slightly unconventional. Everyone used to call her ‘Big Mary’ because she was unusually tall, standing at a statuesque 5ft 10. She was impeccably dressed, well spoken and quite striking, with jet-black hair coupled with eyes of bright blue. Years later we discovered that although she’d been born and raised in Wales, her father had been adopted and had originally hailed from Belgium, which I guess went some way to explaining her unusual and captivating looks. As well as being beautiful, she was always on trend, with her maxi coats and hot pants – quite outrageous and cool for a mum. The problem is, when you’re seven years old the last thing you want is an outrageous mother outside the school gates waiting to collect you, and at that age no one thinks their mother is cool, do they? At the time, I just wanted my mum to fit in with all the other mums, but that was never going to happen, and I remember noticing a lot of the other women staring at her whenever she came up to the school for any reason. Mum was always the forthright one who asked all the questions at any sort of school meeting, too, which, at the time, mortified me. She wanted to be on top of everything because she knew the importance of education, and she was determined that Vicki and I weren’t going to get left behind. A few years later, in fact, Mum went back to education herself, doing a degree in Law and Politics in her late thirties.

She was assertive and outspoken, but it was always well intended. She never let anyone get the better of her, and I admired her for that, despite the fact that it sometimes got us all into hot water. I remember an occasion on the 171 bus on the way to my Aunt Jenny’s when Mum had a bit of a set-to with the bus driver, who she felt was being rude to her.

‘I’m not having this!’ she snapped. ‘No! I’m not having anyone speaking to me and my girls like that!’

We were all turfed off at the next stop, watching the warm bus full of people disappear up the high street while we waited for the next to come along in the freezing cold.

We lived in the basement flat of a massive, rambling house in Highbury Hill, Islington – right opposite the Arsenal stadium. It had a huge and wonderfully overgrown garden that we could run wild in, just like an adventure playground, and it was perfect for the occasional big bonfire. These days, a house like that might cost four of five million, but in those days the area was far less affluent: quite bohemian in its way, but rough and ready in parts. Vicki and I shared a bedroom with Mum and had bunk beds across the room from her double bed. There were all sorts of weird and wonderful people living under that roof, and there always seemed to be lots of interesting comings and goings, with music coming out of every room. Most of Mum’s friends and acquaintances were colourful characters, too, and they were usually quite hip and forward-thinking. Mum’s good friend Eileen, for instance, was engaged to a black actor back in the 1960s when mixed-race relationships were still very thin on the ground. I remember seeing them all go off to the register office wedding when I was about eight, with all the women wearing fur coats. The bride was kitted out in a short fur coat and high boots, and I remember thinking it was all tremendously stylish. It was so unusual to see a mixed-race wedding back then, but to my mum and her friends it was just a happy occasion to be celebrated, and I feel quite proud that we had such a cool mother. It was embarrassing at times, but mostly I loved the fact that we were different from the other kids I went to school with.

On the top floor of our house lived a woman who made hats, and my sister and I would sometimes go up to her place if we came home from school before Mum was back from work. She was forever attaching feathers and other bits and pieces to her fancy hats with something that smelled like paraffin. Chances are it wasn’t actually paraffin, but whatever it was she used, it was flammable, as we discovered one day to our cost. My sister and I often played with this woman’s little boy, and a few days after Vicki’s birthday, she took all her cards up to proudly show him. At some point during the afternoon, Vicki and the boy got into a scrap and he decided it might be a good idea to set fire to her birthday cards with a match. As you can imagine, the whole place went up fairly quickly, what with the cards, the fabric for the hats, and whatever flammable substance this woman, whose name I don’t remember, was using to attach all her trimmings. The whole top floor was suddenly ablaze: it must have been terrifying for two little girls, but I don’t remember too much about what happened next. What I do know is that my sister took me to hide behind a sideboard until a fireman came into the room and picked me up, taking me down a ladder to safety. Meanwhile Vicki ran and hid under a table and nobody knew where she was. In the end, an old man who lived in one of the other flats bravely went back into the burning building with a wet towel over his head and rescued her. Luckily nobody was hurt badly in the fire, but Vicki still has the scars on her hands where they were burned. It wasn’t the first time fire had touched my life, and it wouldn’t be the last, either.

CHAPTER 2:

‘I’LL LET YOU RIDE MY CHOPPER FOR FIFTY PENCE!’

When I was seven, we moved to the top floor flat of a house with a big yellow door, 7 Fairmead Road, which was just off Holloway Road. This was another huge place with lots of flats within one building, owned by a friend of Mum’s, so Mum got the job of looking after the place – a sort of live-in caretaker. It had a communal phone box in the downstairs hall, and whenever I talked to my school friends on the phone I’d shove as many coins as I could into the slot so the pips never went. I’d have been so embarrassed to admit that we couldn’t afford our own phone, especially further down the line when I was chatting to a boy that I had a crush on. It was the same with our gas and electric meters, which you had to feed to keep the power running. I’d have been horrified if one of my friends had been round at ours watching television when the electricity went off. Not that it was particularly unusual in the 1970s anyway; it was the decade of strikes and power shortages. In the early- to mid-seventies the Conservative government introduced the three-day week to save electricity, and by the end of the decade uncollected rubbish was piled high on the streets during the ‘winter of discontent’. Then there were the seemingly endless power cuts, which Vicki and I didn’t mind so much, because if there was no light when we got home from school it meant that we couldn’t do our homework. Mum told us that she used to read by candlelight as a child, simply to save on electricity, and that’s the reason her eyesight got so bad while she was still young.

During the power cuts, Mum would take us down to Pete’s Café on the Holloway Road, which always seemed to stay open, lit by candles. For a special treat she’d take us to the Italian restaurant at the top of Highbury Hill, where she’d order two plates of spaghetti Bolognese and split them between the three of us.

‘Two dinners and three plates,’ she’d always say.

It was her way of being economical yet still taking us out for a posh meal. I thought it was terribly glamorous going out for dinner at a proper Italian restaurant, with its freshly laundered tablecloths and those squat bottles of Chianti encased in straw, all lined up on the shelf behind the bar. The mid-1970s were difficult times, but they could be strangely exciting for us kids.

Holloway Road was a very working-class area with a big Irish community, and there seemed to be an Irish pub on every corner: the Cock Tavern, the Half Moon, and at the top of the Holloway Road was the Gresham Ballroom, which was a well-known dancehall and a big meeting place for the Irish people in the area. Many of my happiest childhood memories come from growing up around there. Memories of the sound of the ice cream van and the bell of the rag-and-bone man ringing along the street, of roller-skating up and down Fairmead Road and playing with all the other neighbourhood kids, who came from a rich, cosmopolitan mix of cultures and backgrounds. There was an Italian family living across the road, a Polish family one side of us and a Jamaican family on the other. We would quite often go for dinner with the Jamaican family because Vicki and I were friends with their twin girls, Erthia and Donna. The food they had was delicious: spicy jerk chicken and rice. It was very different from the stuff we ate at home, although Mum loved to cook, too, and she wasn’t afraid to try something different or ‘modern’. I remember thinking us very cosmopolitan when we had our first spaghetti Bolognese with garlic bread. We even had curry – even though it was out of a tin from Marks and Spencer.

When you were a kid in those days, ‘playing out’ was what you did. There were no Xboxes or internet. You went out into the street with your scooters or roller skates, and there was someone to play with right outside your front door. At weekends and during the school holidays we’d be out there all day, until a stream of synchronized cries cleared the streets.

‘Your tea’s ready!’ ‘Time to come in!’

Bikes were a very big deal, with who had what bike and which was the best bike being a big topic of banter on our street. Daniel Painter was a very good-looking boy who proudly cruised up and down Fairmead Road on what was considered to be the ultimate bike of the early 1970s.

‘I’ll let you ride my Chopper for fifty pence,’ he’d tell many a young girl, and they’d all fall for his charms, as well as his cool wheels.

I was as taken with him as the next girl, but I wasn’t going to give the cocky little sod any of my hard-won pocket money for a go on his Chopper – no way! My sister Vicki, on the other hand, was a bit more of a pushover. Like most of the boys, Daniel fancied her because she had the gift of the gab and was much more confident than I was. She accepted a ride and ended up falling off and cutting her leg quite badly. After the accident, Daniel turned up with a toy ring and ‘proposed’ to Vicki by way of an apology. She kept that ring for years.

Tuesday was always my favourite day of the week because that was when Jackie magazine came out, and I’d tear across the road to the newsagent to get my copy without fail. All the girls loved Jackie with its pop star posters, fashion and beauty tips and true-life stories, but for me the best bit was the ‘Dear Cathy & Claire’ problem page. Years later, I worked with children’s author Jacqueline Wilson on a film adaptation of her book The Illustrated Mum. Jacqueline had worked on Jackie when she was very young and just starting out, and it’s been said that the magazine was actually named after her. She told me that on a quiet week the writers had to sit around the office making up a few of the problems that went on the ‘Dear Cathy & Claire’ page, which made me chuckle.

Growing up in the sixties and seventies there were some things you just took for granted. Like your parents going into the pub and leaving you outside in the street with a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and a glass of lemonade, or the fact that there were no seatbelts or children’s car seats in the backs of cars. On Saturdays we always went to Saturday morning pictures at the Odeon on Holloway Road, but my mum never went with us. It’s hard to imagine today’s mums and dads dropping their seven- or eight-year-old kids at the cinema on Saturday and leaving them there, unsupervised, but that was the way it was back then.

The show would start at about 9.30am, and we’d watch cartoons, then a serial (usually some black-and-white classic like Flash Gordon or Tarzan) and then there’d be a movie. If you were lucky you’d get a Cliff Richard or a Frank Ifield film, which I loved. Then afterwards there might be a little disco or a dancing competition, with kids jumping on the stage and throwing themselves around to the latest pop hits. It was utter mayhem but all very innocent, and everyone was there to have fun. When the show was over we’d get a bag of chips for five pence down the Holloway Road and wander home. Then on Saturday afternoons we’d usually go swimming at the Hornsey Road baths. Things seem so different now. I would never have considered letting my daughter Maia go out and about without an adult at that age, but back then it was just the done thing. We were always doing something under our own steam.

I had a thing for markets, and Mum would often take us to Chapel Market in the Angel, Islington, where almost everyone seemed to know her.

‘All right, Mary, how are ya?’

‘Hello Mary! Hi Vicki, Michelle!’

People would shout at us from all the stalls. At the end of the market there was a toy shop, which Mum would take us to every Sunday if we’d both been good girls. There we were allowed to pick out new outfits for our dolls: Vicki’s Barbie and my beloved Sindy doll. I adored the commotion and the noise of the market and the constant flurry of different people all going about their daily lives. My mum still uses it now, and whenever I go down there with her I’m overcome by an incredible nostalgia. I think there’s something magical about those good old working-class markets, especially growing up in London in the sixties and seventies when they seemed to be everywhere, before the supermarket chains took hold. Years later I even worked on one, selling earrings on Portobello Road, and nowadays I always try to seek out the local markets wherever I travel.

We were very self-sufficient as kids, and we had to help with the household chores. We took our clothes to the launderette on Sundays and we helped to keep things clean and tidy at home. It wasn’t that we were neglected, but Mum was always doing lots of little part-time jobs so that she could make ends meet as well as taking care of Vicki and me. We had to help out, and in those days it wasn’t unusual for kids to look after themselves from time to time. We weren’t mollycoddled or cocooned, but that’s just the way it was. There were a few times when we’d get home from school and Mum would still be out working, but it wasn’t a big deal. We’d just make ourselves a snack and then sit down and watch Scooby-Doo or Magpie on the telly until